How to design custom border style (thickness/width/diagonal) in Excel?

Normally we can easily add all/top/bottom/left/right borders for selected cells in Excel. However, if we want to custom the border thickness, width, color, or add diagonals, it seems a little complex. Here I will show you how to design custom border style with customizing thickness, width, color, or diagonal in Excel, and save custom border style in Excel as well.

This section is talking about how to add custom border for selected cells with special border thickness, width, color, or even add diagonal in Excel easily.

Step 1: Select the cells you want to add custom borders.

Step 2: Click the arrow besides Border button > More Borders on the Home tab.

Step 3: In the opening Format Cells dialog box, please do as follows. (1) Go to the Border tab; (2) In the Style box, click to select one line style. If you want to custom the border thickness, select the line style with proper thickness; (3) Custom the border color with clicking the Color box and then specify a proper color from drop down list; (4) In the Border section, select borders you will add. In our example, we will add Diagonal down border and Diagonal up border, so we click to highlight both buttons as above screen shot shown. (5) Click the OK button.

Then you will see the custom border is added to selected range as following screen shot shown:

Save custom border style

If you want to save the custom border for applying it to other cells in future easily, you can save the custom border as a custom cell style. And you can do as follows:

Step 1: Keep selecting the cells with custom border, then go to the Styles group on the Home tab, and click the arrow button > New Cell Style. See below screen shot:

Step 2: In the opening Style dialog box, type a name for this custom cell style in the Style name box, and uncheck all options except the Border option in the Style Includes (By Example) section.

Step 3: Click the OK button.

The custom cell style is saved in the Styles group under Home tab in Excel.

Note: Actually, in the Style dialog box you can also click the Format button to open the Format Cells dialog box, and then customize a border style on the Border tab. See below screen shot:

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I thought from the title of this article that I would be able to define a custom line thickness/weight.
This just shows how to combine options from the existing presets.
Is there a way to specify a custom line thickness for borders?

There is in Office 2010 - if you click on 'Borders --> Draw Borders --> Line Style', you can click on the Line Style you want, which turns your mouse pointer into a Pen, and you can then click/drag the cells where you want the specialized line applied.